Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Peter Klaver sent us something we don’t see here often: underwater photographs—and there are some videos as well. Peter’s captions and notes are indented.
Included below are 5 full sized scuba diving photos and 5 smaller preview pictures of movie clips. With each preview picture connected to a video, I’ve provided the url of the movie clip to link to on the Delft University server, where I put the website of the holiday Rachel Wilmoth and I had ( http://dutsm1219.tudelft.net/Africa2018/ ).
From Tofo and Vilanculos in Mozambique we did scuba diving and snorkeling and saw really beautiful underwater wildlife. I do pretty terrible in my knowledge of the Latin names of the animals; hopefully some readers can fill in the gaps and correct my mistakes.
It’s Tuesday, January 29, 2019, and a cold morning in Chicago (right now it’s 10°F or -12°C). But Wednesday is going to be the real killer, with a high of -12°F or -24°C). With the wind, it may feel like—get this— -50°F, or -46°C! That would be the lowest temperature I’ve experienced in Chicago, and perhaps a record.
And so, for only the second time in my 33 years at the University of Chicago, the administration has canceled classes tomorrow. Part of their email:
In light of weather forecasts calling for potentially hazardous low temperatures well below zero in Chicago on Wednesday, Jan. 30, the President and Provost, in discussion with the deans, have canceled all classes and non-essential activities at Chicago locations for Wednesday. The cancellation covers classes in Hyde Park as well as those at the Gleacher Center and NBC Tower downtown.
The National Weather Service is predicting that temperatures could reach 20 degrees below zero on Wednesday, with the potential for low temperatures Tuesday through Thursday. University classes and activities currently scheduled for Tuesday night may be affected as well, since the current weather advisory begins at 6pm Tuesday. Please check with organizers or the venue ahead of time if you’re unsure.
But in Ireland, reports Grania, warmer temperatures have still engendered panic. (The Irish are weenies about cold.) Here’s today’s headline from the Irish News:
Back to quotidian affiars. It’s National Corn Chip Day: the perfect accompaniment to a good sandwich. (Are corn chips endemic to the UK?) In Kansas it’s Kansas Day, celebrating the admission of that state to the Union in 1861. As Wikipedia notes,
“Annual Kansas Day celebrations include school field trips and special projects to study the history of Kansas, pioneer-style meals, special visits by students to the Kansas Statehouse in Topeka, Kansas, performances of Home on the Range, the Kansas State Song, and special proclamations by the Governor of Kansas and members of the Kansas Legislature.”
On this day in 1819, Stamford Raffles landed in Singapore, shortly thereafter claiming it for Britain. On January 29, 1845, Edgar Allen Poe, using his name for the first time in a public work, published “The Raven” in the Evening Mirror. In 1886, Karl Benz patented the first successful automobile driven by gasoline. And on this day in 1891, Liliuokalani was proclaimed the last monarch (and only queen regnant) of Hawaii. Her rule lasted only two years before Hawaii became an American-controlled republic. Here she is (nb.: she also wrote the song Aloha ʻOe whose Yiddish version is Aloha, Oy!).
Queen Liliʻuokalani
On this day in 1936, the first inductees to the Baseball Hall of Fame were announced; they were Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Babe Ruth, and Honus Wagner. Now they induct almost anyone. And in 1963, the first inductees in the Pro Football Hall of Fame were announced, though I can’t be arsed to look them up.
On January 29 1967, according to Wikipedia, “The ‘ultimate high’ of the hippie era, the Mantra-Rock Dance, [took] place in San Francisco [featuring] Janis Joplin, Grateful Dead, and Allen Ginsberg.” On this day in 1980, the Rubik’s Cube debuted at the Ideal Toy Corporation in London. Here’s the world’s record for solving the Cube: 4.221 seconds!
Finally, on this day ten years ago, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was removed from office after being convicted for corruption. Sentenced to 14 years, and now in the pen, he’s appealed to Donald Trump for a commutation of his sentence, and may well get it.
Notables born on this day include Emanuel Swedenborg (1688), Thomas Paine (1737), William McKinley (1843), W. C. Fields (1880), Paddy Chayefsky (1923), Germaine Greer (1939), Linda Buck (1947; Nobel Laureate), Oprah Winfrey (1954), and Heather Graham (1970).
Those who died on January 29 include King George III (1820), Edward Lear (1888), Alfred Sisley (1899), Fritz Haber (1934; Nobel Laureate), H. L. Mencken (1956), Jimmy Durante (1980), and Rod McKuen (2015).
Here’s my favorite poem by Lear, read with the original illustrations:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is disgusted with the weather:
Hili: This white, fluffy stuff is falling from the sky again.
A: It’s snow.
Hili: I know. It had the same name last year.
In Polish:
Hili: Znowu to białe, puchate coś leci z nieba!
Ja: To jest śnieg.
Hili: Wiem, w zeszłym roku też się tak nazywał.
A special treat: a picture of kitten Hili resting atop Darwin, Andrzej and Malgorzata’s late dog (photo by Sarah Lawson):
A shaved alpaca sent by reader gravelinspector. All I can say is “double oy!”
When I was in Hawaii I became fascinated with the surfing culture, and curious about why so many people devote their lives to it. I’d probably understand more if I ever tried it, but that’s not going to happen. Yet I can get an idea of its allure when I watch videos like the ones below, showing people surfing the really big waves. Clearly, it takes a lot of skill and experience to do that, and the thrill, enhanced by the considerable dangers, must be huge.
It is a fact the whole world knows that the world’s biggest surf-able waves are off the coast at Nazaré, Portugal, located where the red is here:
Nazaré is a popular surfing destination because of its very high breaking waves that form due to the presence of the underwater Nazaré Canyon. As the canyon creates constructive interference between the incoming swell waves, it makes their heights much larger on this stretch of coast.
Due to the height of the waves, numerous surfing records have been set at Nazaré. In November 2011, surfer Garrett McNamara, who resided in Hawaii at that time, surfed a then record-breaking giant wave: 23.8 m (78 ft) from trough to crest, at Praia do Norte, Nazaré. On November 8, 2017, Brazilian surfer Rodrigo Koxa broke the previous record by surfing a big wave of 24.4 m (80 ft); for this feat he won the Quiksilver XXL Biggest Wave prize and entered the Guinness World Record for the biggest wave ever surfed. Social media wrongly attributed a footage of German surfer Sebastian Steudtne surfing another big wave also in Nazaré to Koxa; both have made public statements in attempts to correct the original misinformation. In the meantime, Portuguese surfer Hugo Vau surfed a potentially 35 m (115 ft) high wave, known as “the big mama”, on 19 January 2018. This achievement yet to be validated.
The waves at this point can also be dangerous to those ashore. In August 2012, a freak wave killed a 5 year old British girl and her grandfather walking along Salgado Beach.
First, this is the wave surfed by Vau, though the YouTube says it took place on January 17, not 19. And, though you can’t see Vau (or at least I can’t), Inertia assures us that Vau is riding this 35-meter wave. If you can see him, let us know. I can’t imagine a human being on that thing.
And a compilation of surfers on lesser but still giant waves at Nazaré:
Here’s a segment from 60 Minutes showing the technicalities of surfing such waves, and introducing us to two Aussie surfers who displays their enthusiasm. This is really a fascinating report.
UPDATE: Note that, in comment #17, reader Michael sussed out that Tippet has had 2.6 million dollars in grants from the Templeton Foundation, with the latest grant, expiring in mid-2020, worth nearly $1.2 million. The New York Magazine article didn’t mention that, of course, and I should have been aware enough to look this up. Whatever Tippett’s selling (woo and science-dissing), Templeton likes it!
__________________
Back in the old days, Krista Tippett’s show on National Public Radio was called Speaking of Faith, and was pretty religious and New-Agey. But Tippett had her ear to the ground, and, realizing the increasingly secular nature of America, she changed the name of her show to On Being. That secularism is mentioned in a new article about Tippett and her show in New York Magazine, also reprinted in The Cut (click on screenshot):
Now I’ve long been a critic of On Being, as it seems to be the audio equivalent of a self-help book, but one aimed at self-styled intellectuals. And yet, despite my revulsion at the platitudes that pass for wisdom on the show, and at Tippett’s tendency to choke up when realizing the depth of her own profundity, I continue to listen to the show if it comes on when I’m doing my Sunday-morning shopping. Why? As someone once said, “For the same reason you sniff the milk when you already know it’s gone bad.”
I could say I’m hoping for some substantive discussion, but that’s a lie. I just enjoy yelling at my car radio and writing about it on this site. It also distresses me that Tippett’s show is wildly popular, at least according to Amy Larocca’s article. Why is there such an audience for this aural pabulum?
So once again I pick up the cudgels. Larocca interviews Tippett, and I’ll be hornswaggled if I can make much sense of what Tippett says. But reading the article, I was stopped in my tracks by this bit, recounting a day when Larocca and Tippett head off to a “jolly” (??) restaurant from Tippett’s office:
Before we left, just as Tippett was slipping into a pair of Ugg boots for the walk around the corner to dinner, a handful of her staffers appeared, in pajama pants and “On Being” sweatshirts, clutching pillows and bags of organic popcorn for movie night in a conference room downstairs — Sleepless in Seattle. Tippett’s executive producer, Liliana Maria Percy Ruíz, is a movie buff and the host of This Movie Changed Me, an “On Being” podcast. Profit Idowu, an engagement manager, joked that the movie was made the year he was born. They all giggled and rolled their eyes, then gleefully tripped down the stairs.
The only thing missing here is the Play-Doh, puppies videos, and Crayolas. I couldn’t have made up that scenario if I wanted to. Organic popcorn! Uggs! Sleepless in Seattle! (The movie actually isn’t bad, but somehow it fits right into the paragraph.) Pajama pants and radio sweatshirts! No wonder that Tippett calls her new conversational segment “an unusually safe space.”
But on to Tippett’s quotes from the article. I would be pleased as punch if readers can explain these to me:
. . . “We have exhausted the limits of the supposedly rational, the political, of the things we can measure with numbers attached and so-called rational arguments and solutions,” Tippett says. “We have exhausted the limits of that as our primary vocabulary, and all the things that have risen to the surface of our life together now, and of our political life, and of our economic life, are about the human drama. And that’s actually what we’re paying attention to, and that’s what spiritual life attends to. It’s inner life. That’s not the only definition of it, but that’s my definition.”
Seriously? We have exhausted the limits of the SUPPOSEDLY rational? Now we have to talk about the “human drama”? Yes, there’s surely room for emotions in life, but not all of politics and economics is about “human drama”. And about exhausting the “supposedly” rational—well, I have no words. I am shaking and crying now.
Tippett spent some of her younger days in Berlin as a stringer and assistant to diplomats. Here’s what she says about that:
. . . While there, Tippett began working as a freelance journalist, then as an assistant to several high-ranking American diplomats. It was, she later wrote, the proximity to power that led to her interest in probing the moral, spiritual, and theological questions that have come to define her work. As she writes in Speaking of Faith, “In Berlin, I learned that transcendent goals like peace and justice are always made possible, or rendered impossible, by the patterns of the human heart. The human condition is the reality around which political life revolves — and upon which it falters. Even the highest levels of diplomacy and geopolitical strategy are about treating the symptoms of humanity on the loose.”
But what are the “patterns of the human heart”? Is Tippett trying to say that the way people feel about things affects how they try to achieve political goals? If so, well, that’s true but trite. (It is, in fact, a Deepity.) And “the human condition is the reality around which political life revolves”? Couldn’t you say that about any human activity?
The last sentence defies my understanding, but it sounds good, doesn’t it?
But wait! There’s more!
. . . “I grew up in an immersive southern world that had all the answers,” she says. “I do love deep religious conviction, and I really honor that, but I like the idea that we can hold that in a creative tension with a real humility before mystery.” She prefers to talk to people about beauty and love and loss, not whether someone believes in God, say, or adheres to certain boundaries in daily life. “Early on, I interviewed this geneticist who is also an Anglican priest,” she says. “He’s so cool. And he said that if there is a spirituality of scientists, it is that at one and the same time you are compelled to discover truth and cleave to that and mine it and also to live in expectation of everything that is yet to discover.”
Okay so she honors deep religious conviction (Tippett is never confrontational because she thinks that’s bad); but we’ll let that pass. But what on earth is a “real humility before mystery”? She’s not talking about the mystery of Dark Matter or the origin of life here; she’s talking about The Big Emptiness Within Millennials, and how she tries to fill it with her swell-sounding palaver. And as for that priestly scientist, it’s not really that cool, as the person is clearly infected with cryptic cognitive dissonance. And “Everything That is Yet to Discover” is either about scientific facts, in which case it’s not spiritual, or it’s about the Nature of Being, in which case it’s flabby and gaseous.
Let there be no doubt: in my mind, Tippett is the Queen of Deepities, and her audience laps this stuff up. I don’t get it and I don’t acclaim it. Give me the frank and confrontational emissions of Christopher Hitchens any day.
Last night as I was perusing my bookshelves, I came upon my copy of TheRubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in the Edward FitzGerald translation. It was given to me by my Uncle Moe when I was just a tyke, inscribed in green ink this way: “To Jerry: Live, love, and laugh, for life is short enough in itself. Uncle Moe.” Since then I must have read that poem a hundred times, and the combination of the Persian Khayyam’s aphorisms and FitzGerald’s translation seven centuries later, couched in appealing AABA quatrains, has been immensely appealing—and life-altering.
Now I know that FitzGerald’s translation is controversial and has been said to misrepresent Khayyam’s views, but it doesn’t matter. What matters to me is that, in its present form, the poem is a denigration of religious austerity and a paean to hedonism. And it’s one of the three books that has had the greatest influence on my views about life. This post is about those works, ending with a request for readers to share their own life-altering literature.
Now when I describe these three works, I am not saying they’re the greatest works of literature, or the works that I most admire. They’re not, and some might see the three even as sophomoric. I’ve written before about what I consider the greatest works of literature, including Dubliners, Ulysses, Crime and Punishment, The Master and Margarita, Middlemarch, Anna Karenina, The Sun Also Rises, and so on. What I’m saying is that the works I’ll discuss gave me “brainworms,” forever affecting my attitude towards life.
In the case of the Rubaiyat, it was hedonism, or rather the view that the enjoyment of life is the goal of life: life is short. And by hedonism, I don’t mean the carousing and wine-drinking espoused by the Persian. Rather, I mean the view that we should live each day as if it were our last, and try to expunge regrets. My own view of “pleasure” includes not just wine, but effort: I’ve realized, late in life, that I don’t enjoy myself unless I’m facing a challenge, a challenge that involves mastering (or trying to master) something I’ve never done before.
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”
The idea that life should be lived in the moment, and that time is fleeting, became more pressing when I became an atheist at age 16. Then I began to embrace the view of St. Bede:
Your Majesty, when we compare the present life of man on earth with that time of which we have no knowledge, it seems to me like the swift flight of a single sparrow through the banqueting-hall where you are sitting at dinner on a winter’s day with your thegns and counsellors. In the midst there is a comforting fire to warm the hall; outside the storms of winter rain or snow are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the hall, and out through another. While he is inside, he is safe from the winter storms; but after a moment of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the wintry world from which he came. Even so, man appears on earth for a little while; but of what went before this life or of what follows, we know nothing.
Well, I am pretty sure of something: the sparrow came from oblivion and likely goes back to oblivion.
The second of the three books that influenced me also limns the message of the shortness of life and the need to keep that in mind while living: Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis. Zorba, also a drinker and carouser, constantly reminds his “boss” (my alter ego) to loosen up and enjoy himself, for we won’t get back the time we spend on the planet. When Zorba, old but still chasing women and adventures, is on his deathbed, he gets up, grips the windowsill, and utters his last words: “A man like me should live a thousand years.” How can one forget that?
I can’t say I’ve been entirely successful in my aspiration to be more like Zorba or Khayyam: I’m a workaholic who still goes to the office at 5:30 am, even when retired. But that’s because I get pleasure from working; and when the work wears me out, I head to some faraway clime for adventures. But at least I have the aspiration rather than the Thoreau-ian quiet desperation.
The last “influencing” book I’ll mention is Arrowsmith, by Sinclair Lewis. It’s the only fully realized novel about a scientist that I’ve read, and it’s a good one. Yes, it’s sappy in bits, but it won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (Lewis turned it down) and played a role in the Nobel Prize for Literature he was awarded in 1930.
The book, based largely on the experiences of Lewis’s microbiologist collaborator Paul de Kruif (not listed as an author), has characters loosely based on real scientists de Kruif knew throughout his career. Martin Arrowsmith, starting off as a small-town Midwesterner, works his way up to being a scientist at a prestigious school (modeled on the Rockefeller Institute), adhering all the while to the purest aims of the scientist. And at the end he throws much of his scientific trappings away to adhere to his principles, retiring to a cabin-laboratory in Vermont with his scientific BFF to do research on his own.
Arrowsmith is at some odds with the other two books in that it praises hard work, austerity, and the abnegation of worldly pleasure in favor of science. (At the end, Arrowsmith leaves his wealthy wife because she’d slow down his research.) But what it did for me, as it has done for other scientists, is to present an ideal toward which we should strive: an ideal of unsullied pursuit of the truth leavened with a good measure of doubt and self-criticism. The book didn’t make me a scientist, but it surely conditioned my attitude towards science.
At one point Arrowsmith, steeling himself for tedious research, utters what he calls “the prayer of the scientist”:
God give me unclouded eyes and freedom from haste. God give me a quiet and relentless anger against all pretence and all pretentious work and all work left slack and unfinished. God give me a restlessness whereby I may neither sleep nor accept praise till my observed results equal my calculated results or in pious glee I discover and assault my error. God give me strength not to trust to God!
Arrowsmith was not religious, and this prayer is still a model for any scientist.
I’ve had my say, and others may feel that my choices are sappy. So be it: these others may be right, but these books did influence the way I look at life.
Now it’s the turn of readers: which works of literature (or art or music) have most changed your life, or the way your view your existence?
Maybe it’s a bit clickbaity to use the word “versus” in the title, but since Aslan is a faith-coddler, and the other religionist, William Schweiker, is identified as “Leading Theologian and Ordained Minister of the United Methodist Church, Author of Dust that Breathes: Christian Faith and the New Humanisms, and Director of Enhancing Life Project”, this looks to be a discussion in which there will be disagreement. And it looks like big fun.
Click on screenshot to go to the site, where you can register (just give your name and email) to get one or more free online tickets (click on the green “register” button). I’m going, and of course I’ll report on how it went.
Here’s the description of the program.
Tuesday, February 5th at 5:30 PM
The Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts
915 East 60th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
The Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge invites you to a discussion about the past, present, and future of belief. Join award-winning writer and commentator Reza Aslan (author of Beyond Fundamentalism), controversial philosopher of science and culture Daniel Dennett (author of Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon), and respected religious ethicist William Schweiker for a conversation that will take the long view on religion as a human enterprise: its history, its power, and its prospects. We hope to bring believers, critics, and everyone in between into a productive—and provocative—dialogue about the place of faith in our changing world.
Religion, Identity and the Construction of Faith will be moderated by David Nirenberg, Interim Dean of the UChicago Divinity School. The discussion will be held at the University of Chicago’s Reva and David Logan Center Performance Hall on February 5, 2019. Doors open to the public at 5:00 p.m.; the event will run from 5:30-7:00 p.m., with a reception to follow.
Award-winning titles by these acclaimed authors will be available for sale by the Seminary Co-op Bookstore in the lobby of the Logan Center Performance Hall from 4:30-7:30.
Given the moderator and discussants, it looks as if Dennett will be playing the role of the Greeks at Thermopylae.
While I have a comfortable backlog of photos, I can always use more, so if you have some good pictures do send them in! Today we have some bird photos taken by reader Paul Peed, whose notes are indented:
My primary birding “patch” is T.M. Goodwin Waterfowl Management Area located within the Upper St. John’s River Basin in Brevard County, Florida. The original 6300 acre marsh was ditched and drained for cattle grazing and production citrus groves until purchased by the state and restored for wetlands management.
These images give you a good idea of the wetlands habitat at T.M. Goodwin.
Summer:
Fall:
Early winter:
T.M. Goodwin provides habitat for wide variety of wetland wildlife but the emphasis is on wintering, year round resident and migratory waterfowl. I have found it to be an exceptional habitat for raptors and these birds of prey have become a passion of mine.
I participate in the citizen science program eBird which is an online database of bird observations providing scientists, researchers and amateur naturalists with real-time data about bird distribution and abundance.
The raptor that got me going was the Red-shouldered Hawk (Buteo lineatus) Order: Accipitriformes Family: Accipitriadae. At Goodwin, the lineatus and extimus groups are seen.
I stumbled across this guy just after a vicious thunderstorm. RSHs tend to take cover under the fronds of cabbage palms at Goodwin.
Red-shouldered Hawks are monogamous. In my experience, they remain in the same territory year after year. I can expect to see a particular RSH at a particular spot every time I explore Goodwin. This couple is very familiar to me. The female is the larger of the pair.
I do my best to resist naming RSH individuals I continually run across but I could not resist calling this one “Bruno”:
I often see them with the frogs, snakes and lizards which are abundant at T.M. Goodwin.
….and this happened just as a wicked thunderstorm began to brew. Exposure control was a real nightmare as the clouds rolled in.
The appearance of these guys changes from juvenile to adult. This is a first year juvenile (I think…just learning about color morphs and juvenile plumage in buteos)
I do my best to avoid disturbing the birds. All of these images were from at least 20 meters.
Next I will send images and descriptions of the less abundant American Kestrel, Snail Kite, Swallow-tail Kite and Merlin.
Here is a link to my identification images at eBird (id images are “quick and dirty” unpolished images but nothing I would be embarrassed to post)
I post for family and friends at Instagram I’m old, retired and comfortable. No need for any publicity, I don’t need my ego stroked and I’m not selling anything.
